Papabubble

380 Broome St. (212-966-2599)

Remember those pallid sourballs petrifying in the dish on your grandmother’s coffee table? They are still there, even if your grandmother isn’t. The sweets at Papabubble, on the other hand, may well have been confected today—you can witness a batch of hard candy being made every couple of hours in the out-front kitchen that is also a stage. There’s something transfixing about watching molten sugar being turned into beautiful goo, and then kneaded and pulled into colorful canes that a Venetian glassblower would be proud to claim. This tiny shop is the latest branch of a franchise that originated in Barcelona and has outposts in Tokyo and Amsterdam. The place is nothing spectacular to look at—neither cutesy, like Dylan’s Candy Bar, nor Ye Olde, like an ersatz penny-candy emporium. With its pale-green walls, steel tables, and beakers filled with glowing liquid food colorings, Papabubble feels more like the stockroom of an underfunded science lab. There are lollipops shaped like Christmas trees, and candy rings to be worn on your finger (I dare you). The goodies in the Math Mix are shaped like pencil erasers, and although none is longer than a quarter inch, each is embedded with a numeral or a symbol. The sugary specimens in the New York assortment have the names of the five boroughs printed inside. You can also special order custom lollipops three feet in diameter and candy portraits based on photographs. The candy comes in grownup flavors such as pear-bergamot, grapefruit-basil, and orange-cardamom, but there are also some—passion fruit, kiwi, apple, and lemon—that would appeal to a sophisticated child. The mango-red-chili-pepper pebbles might be the spiciest thing calling itself candy these days. You want chocolate? Get an egg cream down the block. The only chocolate in evidence here is a delicious filling surrounded by an equally delicious hard coffee sheath, in the striped pillow candy. In sum, the offerings at Papabubble are nothing like Grandma’s sourballs, whose flavors were so insipid that we would simply call them by their colors. As a young visitor on a field trip to the shop put it, “The candy here tastes like freedom.” Or, in the words of a taller customer, “This is what’s cool about gentrification, man.”